5 Opportunities To Grow Revenue: You Will Know When You Are Calm

You want to be part of a growing company, right? Right. However, no matter how awesome a company is, sometimes growth gets stalled. Not a problem.

More often than not, the growth we want is right under our noses. With a little help from Yoda, here are 5 indications that revenue growth is within easy reach.

#1 Expand Sales To Your Current Client Base

Are your current clients asking for help with something that you already do? It’s quite common that your clients don’t know everything you can provide. What’s more, often times clients don’t know that you provide a service that is related to what you’re already doing for them. This is an important distinction because while a company may be able to do many things, people will pay for what they think you do well. It’s part of the secret sauce that prevents you from looking like a jack-of-all-trades and more like an expert.

That being said, pay close attention to what “new” services or products you offer. Try to keep it related to what clients hire you for now, otherwise they might be suspicious or not fully value what you can offer.

#2 Introduce New Services Or Products

That’s not to say you shouldn’t offer totally new services. Listen. Clients will tell you what their pain points are. Hear the same issue often enough and chances are you have an opportunity to offer some “new” solutions. Here I’m talking about a new service that you might not offer yet, or at least not officially.

An easy example of this is at Thunder we support our clients on interactive marketing campaigns, which include inbound channels, content, social, and branding. However, we don’t offer pay-per-click or conversion optimization. These disciplines are tangential to what we offer now, but they’re not part of what we do. Naturally, we hear clients ask for referrals for both; we’ve heard the requests enough so that we have to ask ourselves if we should invest in the resources to support these services.

#3 Expand Into New Industry Verticals

These offer new opportunities and the potential for greater revenue. They also offer diversification which can be a good thing. Using Thunder as an example, here’s a screen shot of our industry verticals by sales percentage in 2013.

As you can see we’re very heavy in real estate. That’s great because it’s been a growing industry. But we know that it won’t last forever and that there are other industries we’d like to pursue where we’re not yet active.

To determine new verticals, we identified which verticals are growing AND are similar to the industries we support now. For example, we have a solid reputation for working with large corporate law firms. We have many years experience in this vertical so we’re pretty familiar with their pain points as well as the regulatory aspect of this industry. Industries we’re expanding into are biotechnology and pharmaceutical, both are highly regulated. As such, we can leverage our familiarity with the regulated legal vertical to get our toe in the door in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical verticals. Legal and medical are different, but they understand each other and believe that if we can support one, then we can also support the other.

Take a look at your sales by vertical and see where you have industry-specific knowledge and expertise. From there, extrapolate out what new verticals you want to pursue and which of your current verticals can help you get there.

#4 Implement Internal Efficiences

Growth is not always about adding more fuel to the fire. More often than not it’s about looking at what you’re doing now and what changes you can make to do more, and do it better with what you have. We are in an industry chock-full of tools. Rather than let them be a distraction, see where you can save time and money by paying (or not!) for some tools that might help with tasks and implementation. There are many posts out there that look at where you can gain efficiencies via tools for social media, project management, reporting, invoicing, bookkeeping, etc.

What’s more, be on the lookout for opportunities for new efficiencies that existing tools don’t address. You might end up creating a huge “secret sauce” for your own company, or perhaps even a new revenue source altogether.

#5 Stir Things Up

Have things gotten too steady. Too routine. It’s a death knell. Take a risk. Try a new way of approaching a campaign to see what you learn. Pitch a new industry player just to see what happens. Take a risk. If this makes you nervous, then the unfortunate reality is that you’ll manage yourself into a box and run the risk of losing your current clients, new opportunities, perhaps even your organization. After all, we’re in an industry with constant change. Embrace the change.

Finally, there is no company without people (period). Look to your talent, and/or team members, for where they see growth in opportunities and efficiencies. With everyone working together, you’ll be that much closer to uncovering the opportunities for growth that are right under your nose.